
Article
Lost LA
Fantastic! — L.A.’s Architecture of Dreams
The benign climate of Los Angeles, the excellent highways, the desire to escape into an alternate reality and the skills of Hollywood designers were material causes of our architecture of fakery, informing how donuts, ice cream and pianos were sold.

Article
Lost LA
Different Dreamers: What It Means To Be a Californian Today
The optimistic essence of the California's golden dream endures — as it should — but the future of the state depends on Californians dreaming differently.

Article
Lost LA
The Garden of Paradise: Los Angeles' Lost, Edenic Biergarten
In the 1850s-70s, an elaborately themed garden surrounded the town's most eccentric building, the Round House.

Article
Lost LA
When Southern California Reinvented Itself as "Semi-Tropical"
L.A. once sold its climate as "semi-tropical" – a term that emphasized the uniqueness of its nature. Semi-tropical was semi-miraculous.

Article
Lost LA
Murder in Old Los Angeles
L.A. for a generation was extraordinarily violent, even more violent than frontier towns more famous in Western lore.

Article
Lost LA
Flappers and Indians in the Dream City: The Jazz Age Ends in Long Beach
The Pacific Southwest Exposition embodied the spirit of 1920s Hollywood: spectacle for its own sake, cheerful vulgarity, and commercial hard sell.

Article
Lost LA
The Invention of Southern California's Spanish Fantasy Past
In the 1880s, an author-activist and a once-prominent Angeleno unwittingly constructed an enduring Spanish fantasy past myth for Southern California.

Article
Lost LA
Medicine in Early Los Angeles
At the border of three worldviews – native, colonial, and Anglo – medical care in Los Angeles by the 1850s blended empirical science, European and native folk traditions, and a large dose of medical hucksterism.

Article
Lost LA
How the All-Year Club Sold the L.A. Summer
Most tourists once came to Southern California in the winter – and then the All-Year Club invented the L.A. summer.

Article
Lost LA
Real L.A. Noir: The Case of the Blonde Buried Alive
A popular carnival stunt in 1930s Los Angeles featured beautiful Gloria Graves, buried alive in her coffin.